Free Republic

The National Science Foundation (NSF) project designed to track “misinformation” on Twitter has removed portions of its website that monitored political users, including conservatives who used the “tcot” hashtag. “Truthy,” the nearly $1 million research project being conducted by the University of Indiana, has redesigned its website following the Washington Free Beacon’s initial report on the study. Truthy Removes Part of Website That Monitored Conservative Hashtags Free Beacon prohibited from asking further questions about project The service is intended to monitor “suspicious memes” and “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online. Truthy has received increased...

The vast majority of political journalists — and I include some of my conservative colleagues — are missing a very big story. The Republicans are going to recapture the Senate, picking up more seats than most any forecaster expects. And the House GOP is going to add to its majority. But then comes the big story: The beginning of a new conservative revolution. The idea that nothing much will change if the GOP captures the whole Congress is just plain wrong. The politics and policies in Washington are about to change in a major way. Obama may still be president....

President Barack Obama’s last three vacations cost $6.2 million. As a friend made me think, when he sent me this story, if this man ever opens his mouth again about “income inequality” and “economic injustice,” someone needs to tell him to shut up. A Secret Service agent would be perfect. The next two years can’t be over soon enough. I’m sure he’ll add another $5-$10-million to this obscene bill to shove down our throats before he’s done. According to the Washington Examiner,, “Taxpayers get stuck with $6.2 million tab for just 3 Obama vacations; $40m over 6 years.” Three recent...

Terry Keenan, a former CNN and Fox News anchor, has died. She was 53. Keenan’s sister, Linda, tells TVNewser the cause of death was a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Keenan had been receiving treatment at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. A pioneer among women working in financial news, Keenan joined Fox in 2002 from the now-shuttered CNNfn where she’d been since 1998. Before that, Keenan spent three years at CNBC. Her first television job was at CNN, which she joined in 1986. Keenan left Fox News in 2009 to, in her family’s words, “work on her most cherished production: her son...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)A health care worker who was quarantined at Newark Liberty International Airport after returning from treating Ebola patients in West Africa developed a fever and was being evaluated Friday night. The woman was the first person quarantined under a new screening system announced earlier Friday by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. The woman landed at Newark after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said at the news conference. A legal quarantine was issued for the woman, who was not a New Jersey resident and was set to go on...

ST. PETERSBURG — For more than a year, Susan Portal and her husband, Paul, attended Sunday Mass, but were not allowed to receive communion, the central sacrament of the Catholic Church. The couple had been waiting for his marriage to be annulled by a church tribunal and they married in a civil ceremony so they could bring his son, Luke, then 9, into their home. But marrying outside the church after a divorce barred them from the sacrament. "It was hard," she recalled. "That is such an important part of the Mass for us and here we had a son...

The World Health Organization (WHO) set out plans on Friday for speeding up development and deployment of experimental Ebola vaccines, saying hundreds of thousands of doses should be ready for use in West Africa by the middle of 2015. The Geneva-based United Nations health agency confirmed that two leading vaccine candidates are already in human clinical trials, and said another five experimental vaccines were also being developed and would begin clinical trials next year.

The official autopsy of Michael Brown was leaked earlier this week sparking more protests in Feguson and caused the Justice Department to condemn the release of the information. According to reports, Attorney General Eric Holder is “exasperated” over the “selective leaks” in the Brown case. Brown family attorney Benjamin Crump believes the leaks might be a deliberate move by prosecutor Bob McCulloch. On Friday, “NewsOne Now” guest host Mo Ivory and the Straight Talk panel (Ray Baker, Lauren Victoria Burke and Jarvis Stewart) discuss the leaked information, how the Darren Wilson team may be using the leaked information to craft...

It was just another trip to Wal-Mart for 2nd Lt. Joshua Nelson when he popped in to grab some fish hooks for a family trip to the lake this past Spring. Little did he know that a quick shopping trip would turn into so much more. The West Virginia Air National Guardsman was walking to the Hunting and Fishing section when he heard a woman say, "Stop, put it down!" "I could tell she was stressed and she sounded frightened," said Nelson. "I looked into the aisle, and this young man had a knife to a woman's stomach." According to...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Mark Steyn, author of “The Undocumented Mark Steyn,” argued that culture is more important than elections, and that he liked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) as someone who could shift American politics to the right in an appearance on Tuesday’s “Hannity” on the Fox News Channel. Steyn stated “vision’s the important part. What's actually happening is that the kind of model of the social democratic welfare dependency state since the Second World War has run out of gas. It's over, and to persuade people to move off that model actually requires you to have a conversation with the people and change...

Archbishop Joseph Kurtz of Louisville, Kentucky, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was an active participant in this month’s Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the theme “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family in the Context of Evangelization.” The synod’s purpose was to examine challenges to the family today, and ultimately to develop a more effective pastoral approach for the Church in addressing those challenges. In addition to speaking out in defense of the unborn, Archbishop Kurtz has been a vocal supporter of the traditional family against legal recognition of same-sex marriage. During the two-week-long...

Scott Walker appeared to be pulling away from Mary Burke. He led by nearly six points in the respected Marquette Law poll, had cracked 50, and enjoyed a 13-point cushion with independent voters. Then came MU’s mid-October survey, in which Walker’s lead vanished completely, with the race deadlocked at 47. All three of those data points represented noticeable departures from most polling trends, but the top line number showed an exact tie — which mirrors the RCP average. The last three polls of the contest have produced a tie, a Burke lead of one point, and Walker edge of the...

This is incredible. It is precisely what the Restore the Dream 2014 movement is all about, changing minds and changing hearts while helping black people realize that the Democrat Party does not help, they damage on a consistent basis. The woman called into C-Span during the time when Barack Obama was doing his early voting. She identified herself as Joyce and indicated that she is an 82-year old black grandmother who has been a Democrat her entire life, but voted straight down the Republican ticket this year. Her voice is filled with both anger and passion as she explains why...

The video is just shy of 7 minutes and 30 seconds in length and contains some foul language, so be advised.

OKINAWA, Japan—Swooping down to 500 feet over the western Pacific, Cmdr. Bill Pennington pilots his U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon surveillance aircraft toward an unidentified vessel off southern Japan. In the back of the plane, a heavily modified Boeing 737, the crew homes in on the vessel using a barrage of surveillance equipment, including radar, GPS and infrared cameras. Further down the fuselage stand rows of tube-shaped sonar buoys that the crew can catapult into the sea and that float for up to eight hours as they track objects underwater. This is a dummy run: Today’s target is a Singaporean container...

October 25, 2014Saturday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time    Reading 1 Eph 4:7-16 Brothers and sisters:Grace was given to each of usaccording to the measure of Christ’s gift.Therefore, it says: He ascended on high and took prisoners captive;he gave gifts to men. What does “he ascended” mean except that he also descendedinto the lower regions of the earth?The one who descended is also the one who ascendedfar above all the heavens,that he might fill all things. And he gave some as Apostles, others as prophets,others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers,to equip the holy ones for...

A Bristol mother is upset after she says her baby was denied a flu vaccination, even though the health department had flu shots on the shelf. When Annie Howard took her 14-month-old son to get his flu shot last week, she ran into what she calls a big problem. "My child is being denied the vaccination outright, denied the vaccination because we have insurance. That baffles me," she says. Howard's physician ran out of the preservative-free vaccination for infants, so she made an appointment at the Sullivan County Health Department. "I called asking them if they have the infant vaccination,...

Health officials fear many people may have been exposed to Mali's first Ebola victim - a two-year-old girl. She recently arrived from Guinea, one of the worst affected countries, and has since died. The girl showed symptoms, including a bleeding nose, while travelling on a public bus through several towns, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. Forty-three people, including 10 health workers, who came into contact with her have been identified and isolated. The girl was being treated in the western town of Kayes, after arriving at a hospital on Wednesday. The child had travelled more than 1,000 km (600...

But the fact is that weak health systems, not unprecedented virulence or a previously unknown mode of transmission, are to blame for Ebola’s rapid spread. Weak health systems are also to blame for the high case-fatality rates in the current pandemic, which is caused by the Zaire strain of the virus. The obverse of this fact – and it is a fact – is the welcome news that the spread of the disease can be stopped by linking better infection control (to protect the uninfected) to improved clinical care (to save the afflicted). An Ebola diagnosis need not be a...

In a game of cat and mouse with health and safety officials, Americans profit off panic with modern versions of snake oil treatments, like vitamins branded ‘Ebola-C’ First of all, Steve Barwick wants you to know that Ebola is a government conspiracy. “This current ‘Ebola crisis’ is … a massive psy-ops campaign,” he wrote in an (undated) blogpost on his website, The Silver Edge. “In other words, the threat is largely being manufactured and planted into the minds of the American public, through the federal government/news media axis.” Barwick, to his credit, points out correctly that the likelihood of coming...